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Seasonal Cartoon: The Nutcracker Suite -- Act III
13 years ago
General
The Dance of the Reed Flutes is presented as the Blossom Ballet:
The picture book's description of the Blossom Ballet is a bit lengthy, so instead I'm going to post the text that talks about something that was cut from the final version of Fantasia's Nutcracker:
After a short pause, a brisk march was struck up by the orchestra, which slowly appeared from the ground in front of the terrace. It was a bug orchestra! Beetles and crickets and dragonflies and caterpillars, ants and spiders and grasshoppers and butterflies -- all playing musical instruments. The violins were made of graceful leaves, and the bows of long thin twigs. This big bass viols were so large that the bugs could hardly hold them up. Every musical instrument was a flower. At the end of the march the trumpets, made of bright morning-glories and trumpet-vine blossoms, blared out their strongest notes.
This seems to indicate that originally Disney had planned to do a sequence interpreting the March of the Toy Soldiers, using it to introduce the Bug Orchestra that was providing the music for the performance. The book itself contains literally dozens of marvelous sketches -- many of them in full color -- of the various members of the insect orchestra. I wish I could share some of these with you, but alas, that would be breaking both copyright and FA rules.
The picture book's description of the Blossom Ballet is a bit lengthy, so instead I'm going to post the text that talks about something that was cut from the final version of Fantasia's Nutcracker:
After a short pause, a brisk march was struck up by the orchestra, which slowly appeared from the ground in front of the terrace. It was a bug orchestra! Beetles and crickets and dragonflies and caterpillars, ants and spiders and grasshoppers and butterflies -- all playing musical instruments. The violins were made of graceful leaves, and the bows of long thin twigs. This big bass viols were so large that the bugs could hardly hold them up. Every musical instrument was a flower. At the end of the march the trumpets, made of bright morning-glories and trumpet-vine blossoms, blared out their strongest notes.
This seems to indicate that originally Disney had planned to do a sequence interpreting the March of the Toy Soldiers, using it to introduce the Bug Orchestra that was providing the music for the performance. The book itself contains literally dozens of marvelous sketches -- many of them in full color -- of the various members of the insect orchestra. I wish I could share some of these with you, but alas, that would be breaking both copyright and FA rules.
By that rule, I shouldn't even be posting these excerpts of the text, but since this book was never reprinted, how else will anybody who can't possibly obtain a copy ever get to read it? If I get a nasty email from WDP telling me to cease and desist, I will remove these journals. Otherwise, they will stay up.
Maybe someday if I ever decide to start a Facebook account, I might post scanned images from the book up there. But that's a big "if," because I've been avoiding FB like the proverbial bubonic plague.